Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  Steadily holding on the back wall, the flashlight reached the end of aisle two, and Lew stood staring through the stacks, fascinated. The cop out front was intelligent: he stood holding his flash down the same aisle, keeping the back wall lighted during the moment it took Pearley to sidestep to aisle three—and now Lew knew there was no way at all to get past either cop.

  The searching cop walked up the third aisle, his light bright on the back wall. The cop out front still stood at aisle two, his light on the back wall also. And now Lew made himself turn away, staring at the rug, trying to think. Within—what? Two minutes? Less?—Pearley would turn into this final aisle to find them standing here; there was no escape. If he’d been alone, Lew thought, he might have run for it; sneaked to the front end of this aisle, then run out into the library past the cop standing guard; ducking, dodging, trying to make it to the doors, out, and then down the street as fast as he could sprint to Harry’s car. But the thought was time-wasting: Jo couldn’t do that, and even if she could, he wouldn’t risk the possibility of a shot. “Lew, I’m scared,” she whispered, and Lew lifted his head: through the stacks he saw the cop begin to back down an aisle, the bobbing circle of his light remorselessly fixed on the end wall. “What if they have their guns out?” she whispered. “What if he turns into this aisle, and shoots when he sees us. It happens! You read about it.”

  “Take it easy,” he whispered. But would Pearley have his gun out? Yes, he would: he couldn’t know what he might walk into each time he turned into a new aisle; Lew knew the gun was in his hand right now. Would he shoot when he saw them? He damn well might; he’d be scared! Lew understood that he had to call out. Right now. Call to them, say where they were, and . . . what? That they were lying face down on the carpet, hands clasped at the backs of their heads, and don’t shoot, please don’t shoot! At the front end of an aisle, he saw across the book tops through the backless shelves, Pearley side-stepped and began to walk up the next, his light on the end wall, the other cop’s light shining down the previous aisle. Hating it, hating to abjectly surrender to this man, Lew opened his mouth to call out.

  Instead he continued to stand for a moment, motionless, mouth still open. Suddenly he squatted, sliced both hands into the books of the bottom shelf, and lifted out a length of them pressed between the flats of his hands. Very swiftly he rose, set them onto the vacant space of a shelf at eye level, and as fast as he could move squatted down again to seize a second length of books, and set them onto still another vacant space above.

  Again squatted at the bottom shelf, making the least possible sound, he slid a third length of books as far as he could, to a vertical divider; and now he had cleared a space perhaps five feet long. He looked up at Jo but she had already understood, and she quickly lay down on the carpet before it. The cop reached another aisle—only two away now—and began backing down it; they could hear his rapid, muffled tread.

  Lew turned to run silently half a dozen feet farther along the aisle, squatted, and began clearing another space along the bottom shelf. Watching Jo in side vision as he worked, he saw her lying on the carpet, her back to the emptied section of shelving just above the floor. Then she wriggled up onto it, facing out, and lay motionless. Her knees protruded slightly but so did books on either side of and above her, and now Lew no longer had time to look at Jo.

  Hardly more than a yard of bottom shelving stood cleared, and he could find no other large gaps on the shelves above. Lew stood desperately hunting, the searching cop side-stepped to a new aisle—the next aisle but one, he saw—and there was not going to be enough time. He squatted, and seized between his flattened palms the greatest length of books he had yet tried to lift, more than two feet of them. Now he had cleared enough space, just barely, if somewhere he could find space for this stack. But as he straightened his knees and stood up, his arms began trembling; the books were big, their weight impossible to hold for more than another second or two, and there was simply no space for them anywhere.

  The cop was well up the aisle, would turn next into the one just beside them—and the long stack of books Lew held at his chest like an accordion began to sag. His arms shaking with the impossible strain, there was no more holding them, and he thrust them straight out before him into the nearly solid wall of shelved books. They gave way—were shoved violently back on their enameled metal shelf onto the filled shelf in the next aisle behind them, tumbling the books there onto the floor, pages fluttering, spilling onto the carpet in a thudding cascade of noise Lew knew must be audible even out on the street. Feet instantly pounded, and Lew dropped to the floor careless of sound, and pushed himself back, up onto the five-foot length of empty space he had created, yanking down his face mask, knees drawing to chest.

  Lights bobbing, feet thudding, the cops reached both ends of the aisle at his back. An instant’s silence, lights frantically searching—“Keep your light outta my face, for crysake!” Then: “Not here! Next aisle!” Feet pounded again and lights glared from each end of the aisle in which Jo and Lew lay motionless on the shelves. “God damn, he made it out front!” One light vanished, the other hurtled down the aisle toward and past them, feet thumping as the cop from the back end raced down their aisle hard as he could go—watching through the eye-slits of his mask, Lew felt a terrible urge to reach out and grab a flying, white-socked skinny ankle.

  Silence: peering past his knees Lew saw the two beams sweeping the main room, crisscrossing, touching ceiling, then floor, trying to search every inch of the great room in an instant. Then: “He’s gone, god damn it! You shoulda stayed out here! What the hell you come inta the shelves for!”

  “ ’Cause he was in there, that’s why! Who the fuck you think dropped the books! He was in there with you, and you missed him, you asshole!”

  “I didn’t miss a god-damn—”

  “All right, all right!” A pause. “Shit.”

  Again the two beams searched but slowly now, without hope. “Lousy hippies,” Pearley’s voice said then. “Stealin’ books. They sell ’em to buy drugs, you know.”

  “I know, I know, for crysake.”

  “Wonder how he got in; the front door was locked.”

  “Came in downstairs,” the other said shortly. “It’s how he got out too.”

  Lew inched forward onto the carpet, and stood; Jo, too, getting to her feet in the dim light from the street lamps through the big windows beside them. Lew walked down to her, and she gripped his forearm hard, laughing silently. “We made marvelous bookends!” she whispered: her shoulders shook with suppressed laughter, and Lew put his arm around them, squeezing her to him, calming her as he led her to the front of the stacks. He felt exhilarated, wanting to do something, felt like yelling in sheer wild exuberance.

  A flashlight emerged from the library office behind the big checkout desk up front, the other approaching from the children’s section. The lights met, and with weary irritability one voice said, “All right, let’s check downstairs.” The lights bobbed across to the double doors of the interior staircase up which Lew and Jo had come, the doors swung open, closed, and again the library stood silent and dark.

  Lew stepped forward, a hand clasping Jo’s wrist, and they walked quickly along the street-side wall toward the outer doors, moving past the tall windows through the light patches from outside. Abruptly, Lew stopped, Jo bumping into him. Lying on top of one of the low standing shelves enclosing the reference section was the book Lew had put down when he’d heard the police arrive: he could make out the gold-leaf title: Who’s Who in the Law. Without picking it up, he began riffling through it, certain that he would find and feeling no surprise when he immediately did, the crude photo-and-poster Harry had put there that evening. Lew held it up triumphantly, and Jo nodded rapidly, frowning, pushing at him to move on. Their tarps were still there, enclosing the table, and he stepped over, tugged them loose from the book weights, and walked on with Jo, bundling the tarps up under his arm, and looking down at the absurdly titled photograph of his n
aked grinning self between two anonymous women.

  For this they had actually risked arrest and jail, maybe worse, and looking at it now, it didn’t seem enough to Lew merely to have recovered it. Now what? Just toss it into a drawer at home? Lew murmured, “Wait here,” and on pure neural impulse, without rational thought, he turned left, walking rapidly across the library along the main desk, away from the front doors. On the other side of the big room he stopped at the large bulletin board facing the main desk, felt for and found a thumbtack in its surface, and stuck the poster to the center of the board, overlaying the notices already there.

  Just behind him, Jo fiercely whispered, “No!” and, reaching past his shoulder, yanked it from the board.

  He didn’t care. Walking back toward the front doors with Jo, an arm across her shoulders as she folded the paper, and gave it back to him, Lew was grinning: he felt wonderfully alive. Again it occurred to him that he’d like to yell, as loud and long as he could hold it, a Tarzan yell, and give the cops downstairs something to make their visit worthwhile. But he didn’t. At the double glass doors he pushed one open for Jo; a white-doored car labeled MILL VALLEY POLICE stood at the curb, its lights out. As Jo stepped past him onto the brick veranda, Lew murmured, “Meet you at the car, and don’t waste time. Now do what I say: run down the walk! Fast!” He pulled the door closed, leaving her outside staring in at him through the glass, astonished. He gestured hard, waving her on, and after a moment she turned away.

  Swiftly now, Lew walked back along the street-side wall to the second window: leaning to one side, he looked out toward Harry’s car. It lay out of sight somewhere ahead, but he saw Jo pass his window, not quite running along the walk, walking rapidly toward the car. Then, behind him, he heard the beginning murmur of voices coming up the inside stairs. He waited, letting Jo move on, then shoved hard against the waist-high, rectangular metal plate at the center of the window. As the lower half of the big window swung outward, a frantic electric trill sounded abruptly, directly beside him and astonishingly clamorous, an enormous bung-bung-bung-bung-bung-bung that split the air of the motionless street.

  Lew stepped outside, edged between the trees of the narrow dirt strip between library wall and sidewalk, then ran. Ahead, the door of Harry’s car stood open, Shirley standing on the walk beside it, waiting. He reached it—laughing hard, the others staring in wonder—sidled into the back seat beside Jo, and Shirley jumped in, and slammed the door.

  In the moment of silence that followed, Lew realized that the engine wasn’t running. Behind them he heard the crash of the library doors bursting open, and he swung around to the rear window: the two cops came hurtling down the shallow brick steps to the sidewalk, actually skidding on the soles of their shoes as they stopped, heads whirling, searching. “Let’s go!” Lew said, swinging to face front, still laughing. But Harry sat motionless, head and shoulders thrust far out his window, looking back. Still watching the cops, Harry’s hand moved to the dash—to start the engine, Lew thought. Instead, Harry pulled a knob, and their lights came on.

  “There they are!” a cop’s voice shrieked over the clamor of the alarm, and again Lew’s head swung around: a cop was running hard around the front of the police car, the other yanking open the door beside the walk. They piled in, doors slamming . . . and still Harry sat staring back at them, making no move to start.

  “Harry, start, start!” Jo cried, but he didn’t move, and now the cop’s headlights flashed on. Harry turned from his window to smile back at Lew. “Here you are, Lew”—he brought up his hand, something dangling from a finger—“a souvenir.” Lew reached forward, and took it, a ring of keys. “The cops’ ignition keys,” Harry said. “They ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He turned to shove head and shoulders out his window. “Hey!” he yelled back. “You’re too late! We got away with it: Tom Swift in the City of Gold, and you’ll never get it back!”

  Lew got out, pushing Shirley’s seat, squeezing out to the sidewalk. The cops’ doors opened, too, and they got out staring at Lew; the alarm clanging unendingly, lights coming on now in houses across from the library. Laughing, Lew yelled, “Hey, Slats! Your pants are too short!” He drew back his arm, and threw hard toward them. Their keys landed on the street, and before they’d stopped sliding along the pavement, Pearley was running for them.

  Lew ducked head and shoulders to slip back into the car, then froze in astonishment: feet sliding to a stop, Pearley had yanked out his gun. Bringing it down to a point, he was yelling in rage: “You mother-fuckin’ bastard, I’ll shoot your fuckin’ head—”

  The other cop cut him off, voice loud but matter-of-fact. “You fire in town, the chief’ll have your stupid ass.” Pearley stood motionless, hesitating, and Lew shoved himself into the Alfa. The other cop yelled it now: “Get those keys, god damn it!” and Pearley holstered his gun, and ran for them.

  Dropping to the seat beside Jo, Lew realized that it had simply never occurred to him—this had been a joke!—that the cop might shoot, and he felt his face flush, deeply, cheeks hot, because he knew that it should have. Harshly, angry with himself and Harry both, he said, “Okay, sonny: you better drive like hell now: you got maybe sixty seconds’ start.” Harry’s starter was whirring before he had finished, the engine caught, and Lew looked back. The cop was snatching the keys from the pavement, then Lew was flung back in his seat as Harry shot forward, scorching rubber, the cop behind them racing for his car.

  The two-block-long Mill Valley business district lay just around the curve ahead, and Harry swung into it at forty-five, accelerating. Street lamps on, curbs oddly empty of parked cars, the green twin of the Alfa Romeo flashed across dark store windows beside them as they reached fifty-five, touched sixty for an instant, then Harry braked, the squeal prolonged. They rounded the right angle onto Blithedale, fishtailing, then Harry’s hand swept through the gears to fifth. A two-mile dogleg length of narrow city street lay ahead now, and Harry hung at sixty-five. Halfway, Lew watching behind, headlights swung into view at the second turn, and the glaring red eye flipped on. Shirley said quietly, “Harry, they could still decide to shoot.”

  Harry hesitated, and Lew said, “No, we haven’t murdered the mayor.” Yet he wasn’t quite sure. Watching at the slanted rear window, he first thought and then knew that the headlights behind them had enlarged, but he let Harry do the driving.

  Ahead the traffic light flashed yellow, no other cars at the intersection. Reaching it, Harry downshifted to third—to cross with caution, Lew supposed—then Harry startled them by swinging left instead, and Lew understood. Even if Harry had wanted to drive all-out, and he probably did not, the police car would be faster still; they’d have been caught before they reached Strawberry. Instead he’d entered the old, two-lane county road to Corte Madera, an endless succession of short curves, left and right, left and right, over and over again for half a dozen winding miles. On this kind of road they could drive as fast as the other car would dare—and, in fact, Harry’s shorter squatter car could swing through the short curves just a bit faster than the bigger one behind them.

  This happened, Harry’s fist sweeping unceasingly through the gears, accelerating hard up to each curve, then swaying around it, engine braking, and instantly accelerating again; hanging in their own lane, never crossing the line to risk a headon. The trees grew thick along the shoulders here, the houses set well back mostly—high up the slope at the left, well down the slope to the right. Lew sat watching across the curves through the trees, and for three minutes or more caught occasional glimpses of headlights and red eye across several bends. Then no more: they were gaining; a few feet, a yard, on each short swing. Lew said, “Harry, they’ve radioed. They’ll have Corte Madera blocking the other end.”

  “I know.” Harry said no more, head and shoulders ducked toward the windshield, a big hand gripping the wheel at eleven o’clock, other fist on the shift knob. He probably didn’t know it, Lew thought, looking at Harry’s profile, but Harry was smiling. Another long minute, po
ssibly two, swinging left, then right, left, then right, the four of them leaning out on each curve, possibly helping to cut down the fishtailing. Then Harry moved closer to the windshield, ducking his head to watch for something on the left, never slowing. “Okay! Just ahead!” he said. “Hang on!”

  Around the curve to the right, then Harry flicked off the lights and swung the wheel hard left. They shot across the road and up into a steep driveway, curving back toward the direction they’d come from. Harry’s hand cut the ignition as he shoved in the clutch, and he toed the brakes. The driveway he’d remembered was a half-moon touching the road at each end. Its center, marked by a flight of wooden stairs leading still higher up the embankment to a house, stood perhaps eight feet above the surface of the road below and beside them. They waited, still rolling slowly forward, and almost immediately twin sharp white beams touched and swept along the dirt embankment beneath them, swinging back onto the road as the car and its red light appeared behind it. The car passed, and now, still slowly rolling, the Alfa dipped onto the downgrade, rolled faster, and re-entered the road in the opposite direction, Harry’s fingers holding the ignition key, clutch shoved in. They rolled silently around the curve, then Harry’s wrist turned, his leg rose from the clutch, and the motor quietly caught.

  He drove fast as ever, pressing hard as he dared on each curve—the cops might have sensed what they’d done. But watching across the curves behind them, Lew saw nothing, and when they came to the Blithedale intersection again, Harry dropped to a moderate speed. On across the freeway overpass into Strawberry, down the service road past the great dark shopping center, then up and around the end of the ridge to home.

  In his stall behind the buildings, Harry turned off the ignition, and Lew said, “That was damned fine driving, Harry; you’ve redeemed yourself, you stupid bastard.”

  Harry turned to grin at them. “Oh man,” he said softly. “I’ve wanted to do that all my life; race them, and beat them. I tried it once in college, and got caught.”